Emerging critical social awareness in evangelical theological pilgrimages in the Philippines

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Abstract

In the Philippines, as in the US and UK and elsewhere, evangelical conversion is
normally regarded as a ‘turning’ from a life ‘without Christ’ towards a life of ‘faith in
Christ’. Traditionally, the potential convert is invited to ‘accept’ or ‘receive’ Christ as
personal lord and saviour. Once a decision to ‘accept’ is indicated, the individual is
considered ‘born again’ or ‘saved’, whereupon he or she is expected to manifest
behavioural signs, such as participating actively in a ‘Bible-believing’ church, while
adapting to its distinct ethos. This conversion, however, has not generally led to a
commitment to issues of economic or social justice. In the years 1946-1986, Filipino
evangelicals have tended to neglect the social question. This is consistently shown in
their general silence during the 1972-81 martial law, the 1983 murder of Aquino and the
1986 people power revolution. Historically and theologically, this particularly
conservative social disposition may have been influenced by a lopsided emphasis on
aggressive evangelism and a general evasion of social questions, especially by US
evangelical missionaries who carried the ‘baggage’ of the fundamentalist-modernist
debate of the 1920s and 1930s. This theological orientation seems to have been
perpetuated, one way or other, by their Filipino converts.
That there are in the Philippines examples of previously socially-disengaged evangelical
converts who eventually moved towards a socially-engaged path, however, seems to
indicate the possibility of a theological re-orientation within this Christian tradition.
This study tackles this particular ‘conversion’ or re-orientation within, not away from, the
evangelical tradition, with the goal of shedding some light on the nature and possibility
of a ‘second conversion’ towards a socially engaged posture.
To explore this phenomenon of interest, the study identifies four different trajectories of
change exemplified by particular theological pilgrimages travelled by Filipino
evangelicals during their adult years. The first trajectory is about the development of a
social conscience which benefited from an active involvement in an international
evangelical student movement. The second represents a largely noncritical exposure
made possible by a protracted career in medical missions that led to a similar awakening
to social injustice. The third involves an evangelical who ended up accommodating
Marxist social analysis. And the fourth concerns how an underprivileged evangelical
managed to attain a second, more critical, perspective on poverty, leading to a
commitment to combat economic injustice. These trajectories are explored through
extensive interviews with each of the four subjects.
Though necessarily limited in scope, the value of this study lies in its potential to gain
some insights into factors that have the potential to ‘convert’ or ‘transform’ minds and
ideological postures. It thus suggests that, at least in contexts of social and economic
polarisation, the evangelical Protestant tradition may not be so inescapably tied to social
and political conservatism as is often assumed. The study ends by drawing some wider
conclusions about the possibility of a second conversion within the evangelical
Protestant tradition.